John Edwards, The Little People, And $ 400 Haircuts

For four decades, Joseph Torrenueva has cut the hair of Hollywood celebrities, from Marlon Brando to Bob Barker, so when a friend told him in 2003 that a presidential candidate needed grooming advice, he agreed to help.

The Beverly Hills hairstylist, a Democrat, said he hit it off with then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina at a meeting in Los Angeles that brought several fashion experts together to advise the candidate on his appearance. Since then, Torrenueva has cut Edwards’s hair at least 16 times.

At first, the haircuts were free. But because Torrenueva often had to fly somewhere on the campaign trail to meet his client, he began charging $300 to $500 for each cut, plus the cost of airfare and hotels when he had to travel outside California.

Torrenueva said one haircut during the 2004 presidential race cost $1,250 because he traveled to Atlanta and lost two days of work.

“He has nice hair,” the stylist said of Edwards in an interview. “I try to make the man handsome, strong, more mature and these are the things, as an expert, that’s what we do.”

It is some kind of commentary on the state of American politics that as Edwards has campaigned for president, vice president and now president again, his hair seems to have attracted as much attention as, say, his position on health care. But when his campaign reported in April that it had paid for two of his haircuts at $400 each, the political damage was immediate. With each punch line on late night TV his image as a self-styled populist making poverty his signature issue was further eroded.

Edwards said that he was embarrassed by the cost and that he “didn’t know it would be that expensive,” suggesting the haircuts were some kind of aberration given by “that guy” his staff had arranged. His wife, Elizabeth, made lots of jokes at her husband’s expense and the campaign wished the whole issue would go away.

But Torrenueva’s account of his long relationship with Edwards — the first he’s given — probably guarantees that won’t happen quite yet. And if $400 seemed a lot for a haircut, how about one for three times that?

I don’t care how much John Edwards pays to get his haircut. If he wants to spend $ 400 to get it done and can afford it, then that’s his right. What I object to is John Edwards’ phony populism, and it’s stuff like this that demonstrates just how phony it is.

Edwards is right. There are two Americas. His America where you can call yourself a populist while spending more on one haircut than most people do on their monthly grocery bill, and the one where the rest of us live.

Would we be shocked if someone were to discover that JFK’s people, at one time or another in the 1960 campaign, paid close to $60 to bring in a classy haircutter for the
candidate (who grew up in one of the richest families in America)? Maybe didn’t happen but certainly could have.
Sixty bucks then would be worth about $400 today. For all we know the patrician FDR may have gotten $10 haircuts in 1932, a similarly relatively huge sum in the Depression. We think of both as champions of the downtrodden and oppressed. Sounds like Edwards grew up lower middle class at best, giving him some right to the populist label, no?